How much are you willing to pay for convenience? Not just money and time, but information? The latter probably depends on how much you trust the person or organization that's asking for it. Two privacy experts explain how the issue of privacy relates to the press, government, and business, and help you decide how much information is too much information to give.

This chapter is from the book

We've talked some now about the types of information that might be collected
about you and the things you might want to be worried about. Now let's
talk about what is really happening, what kinds of data collection is actually
going on, who is using the data, and maybe why.

In this chapter, we discuss the evolution of information gathering. We start
by talking about how people are curious about other people, especially celebrities,
and how far our culture thinks that curiosity can go, appropriately or not.
We'll move on to talk about news reportingother people gathering
information for us that we couldn't likely gather ourselves. From there
has evolved the idea of open government information, easily obtainable these
days via the Internet. And then we're going to get personal with you and
talk about information gathering about you, your preferences, purchases, and
activities online and off. Different kinds of information gathering and the
motivations behind them are discussed a lot in this chapter. We want you to
understand the pros and cons, from all sides, so that you can make intelligent
choices in your own situations.

First, let's consider our own culture and how and what we like to know
about ourselves and others.

We All Want to Know about Other People

We do? Yes, we do; just look at our behavior.

As human beings we are extremely interested in other human beings and how we
relate to one another.

We want to know about movie stars, music performers, actors, elected
officials and other types of people with celebrity. These people are
"public" people and even if we think they are entitled to a modicum of
privacy, we don't really grant it. We avidly read articles about the homes
they own, the businesses in which they invest, the people they marry, and the
activities of their children. We call it news. Of course, it's news about
entertaining people, so it's also entertainment.

Some of us cheer when people we think we "like" do well. We do that
for San Francisco Giant Barry Bonds' terrific home run pace this 2001
spring baseball season, for example. Other times we take morbid pleasure in the
downfall of a celebrity. For example, Robert Downey, Jr. having another bit of
trouble with his drug treatment program. We cheer or boo Mr. Bonds, depending on
our feelings about the San Francisco Giants or congratulate ourselves that we
don't have the sort of drug dependency, like Mr. Downey, that keeps us in
and out of drug treatment centers. We sigh through the sagas of celebrity
divorces, choosing sides just exactly as though we really know the people
involved. We are angry on behalf of one of the couple and frantically defend
their actions, just as if we knew what we were talking about.

Before September 11, 2001, most days the top news stories on many of the online
news outlets included stories about famous or important people. Even now, stories
about people get a lot of notice. Just look most days at the top news. Netscape's
Netcenter (http://www.netscape.com)
is shown as an example in Figure 3.1,
but almost any other news source would be the same. The lead articles typically
are not only about the President's proposed tax program, but also about
the activities of the President's daughters. The sports articles contain
descriptions of yesterday's contests and a number of articles about the
off-field activities (both good and bad) of some sports personages. Human interest?
Of course it is. Clearly, the publishers of these pages and other pages and
printed materials know we're interested and that is what they provide.

We all want to know about the activities of our friends and neighbors, too.
We want to know where they are going, what they are doing, what they just
admired at the store, and what sports contest they are interested in. We never
think of this as prying or invasive. Some of us have nosy neighbors who we find
a pain. Some of us are the nosy neighbors.

Our interest in celebrities is an extension of that curiosity about the world
we are in. We learn to emulate people we admire, and in many ways we learn who
to admire by seeing who other people are interested in. We make celebrities of
the people who create art we admire, and we learn to appreciate some art because
people we admire like it. We learn what athletic feats are marvelous from
stories about sports stars, and we admire athletes because they perform
marvelous feats. We make celebrities of people who act the way we should or wish
we could act, and in turn we try to act like them.

In general, our culture seems to accept the idea that reporting on the activities
of celebrities is acceptable as long as the activities happen in public. We
have even created an industry of celebrity watching. We have special television
programs and channels devoted to it. We have sections of news-oriented Web publications
such as the Living Section of MSNBC.COM shown in Figure
3.2. We subscribe to magazines that are devoted to it. We turn to pages
in our daily newspapers for entertainment about entertainers. We can't
seem to get enough information about our celebrities. We want to know everything
about them, public or not. We don't like to think that our interest might
be invasive.

Figure 3.2 A typical page from the
MSNBC.COM Web site, Living section.

It can be, though. Intense public interest might have contributed to the
death of Diana, the former Princess of Wales. Certainly, some celebrities go to
great lengths to keep their weddings privateor at least to make certain
that the photographs that are released are the official ones, rather than ones
stolen via telephoto lenses. And two baseball players originally from Japan, now
playing with the Seattle Mariners, have recently refused to speak with the
Japanese media anymore. One player was unable to get in his car and drive to
work at the ballpark because there were so many photographers and reporters in
his driveway. Clearly he felt that public interest in his celebrity had gone too
far.